Stranger on Earth

A Note to the Reader: In writing this piece, I have attempted to avoid spoilers. The plot summary below is of the superficial kind and should not spoil anyone’s viewing experience. For a more comprehensive summary, refer to:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(film_series) As far as cinematic war chronicles go, there is not one that is grander and more urgent than Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth 9-hour-and-47-minute trilogy The Human Condition (1959-61), with David Shipman, the famed British film critic, calling it “unquestionably the greatest film ever made” (984). And yet, ironically, few casual viewers will have seen it, partly due to its off-putting length. This should be rectified. The trilogy carries with it a message as pressing and disconcerting as that of Platoon (1986) or Apocalypse Now (1979), and should be acknowledged by anyone with an ounce of interest in humanist cinema. The film may be more than half a century old, but the protagonis...

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is now remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring work, not least because of its detailed and personal account of the Spanish Civil War. Its laconic treatment of the universal subjects of friendship, sex, and love – essentials that give additional meaning to life in times of war – is the reason for its lasting appeal. The plot is crudely simple, like the characters’ motives. American Robert Jordan decides to do his part for the country he claims to love by working as a dynamiter for a republican guerrilla unit, and one day, owing to an assignment to blow up a bridge, he finds himself among a group of disparate rebels hiding high up in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra. The novel records only three and a half days of Robert’s experience (and yet this is the longest Hemingway novel); at the end of the “adventure,” things go horribly wrong, as foreshadowed, and the reader is forced to leave the hero behind and move on – just like the re...